I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Best of 2011: 10 - 6

As I stated in my earlier post, I'm combining a "Best of 2011" retrospective with a good old-fashioned pledge drive.

I had a few people this year thank me explicitly for my how-to-incursion guides. "I read them and started doing incursions with an Armageddon," I was told. "Now I have a Paladin and a Legion!" Is there any nicer way of saying "thank you" than sending me a few ISK? Sure there is: keep reading, enjoying, and commenting on the posts on my blog. ;-) But in the meantime, if you feel like throwing some of your new-found wealth my way, or maybe just the old ships that you're not using any more, I'll find a use for them. Probably just get them blown up, but every minute I don't have to spend ratting to buy ships is a minute I have to write another blog post, right?

Either way, send your contributions to Ripard Teg. And let me know in an EVE mail if you want the fact that you contributed to be public or not. Thank you to Tribleck, Isis Tavore, Ethomas, and Narol Decyg, who sent generous donations, along with very kind comments about the blog. Thanks you so much, guys! Your support means a lot. Thanks also to the several contributors so far who wished to remain private.

I'll be shaking the tin cup over the next few days in the "Best Of" posts, concluding with what I thought was my best post of 2011 tomorrow. And if you don't want to contribute, that's perfectly fine, too. I blog because I enjoy it, not for profit. Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll continue to do so. :-)

Here's #10 through #6 in my Best of 2011:

#10: The die is cast
Boy, did I raise a lot of hackles with this post. I pride myself on my ability to see a lot of different perspectives on an issue, but I think I was the first EVE blogger to actually look at EVE from CCP's perspective, particularly when it came to looking at EVE as a business. This post was the first one where I did that, and if that wasn't bad enough, in the same post I picked up a baseball bat and took a swing at the CSM with it, too (at that time, CSM5). Looking at topics from two or more perspectives and commentary on CSM actions were both trends on the blog this year. Both will continue in 2012.

#9: Weekend's end
There's a great line in The Princess Bride when one character has to bring another character up to speed on current events: "Let me explain. *beat* No, there is too much. Let me sum up." Lots of times this year, people have used my blog as a reference point to bring people up to speed on an event that's happened in the game. Suddenly, in the middle of the day, the blog would get 600 hits, all of them coming from a forum or Facebook or another blog, and it'd be one of my posts like this one where I summed up events while commenting on them. This time, it was the events immediately leading up to the CSM Emergency Summit.

#8: Triumph of the will
On my blog, I will often pull five or six seemingly unrelated facts together into a single blog post and then use those facts to make a prediction. More often than not this year, those predictions came to pass. I'm pretty sure I was the first blogger to come right out and say that Incarna was not going anywhere other than the CQ in 2011, and to predict that the winter expansion would be All About the Spaceships. But in this post, I took it a step further and predicted that DUST might well surpass EVE as CCP's signature product. This post generated a huge comment storm, and we'll only see if I'm right this time next year.

#7: Basic Decloaking Guide
#6: Overheating Guide
EVE player guides -- like the incursion guides -- have always been a big part of this blog. I've written 22 of them this year. But the one that put me on the map in a big way was the Basic Decloaking guide that was one of the first ones I published. This guide took a step-by-step approach to the practice of decloaking, of course. But more than that, it first explained the underlying theory behind the topic being discussed. This was a format that I continued in my other guides, and it's been tremendously popular. The Basic Decloaking guide was the most-read post on this blog in 2011, and the new Overheating guide was read 1700 times in the first hour after it was posted. ;-)

4 comments:

Where did you predict that the winter expansion would be all about spaceships? You said that 2012 would be all about spaceships and that the winter expansion was locked down and unlikely to change. Unless there was some small sentence in there that I missed while skimming through it.

As for DUST. I predict that it will barely be a blip on the FPS scene. It'll have a small niche audience (much like EVE), but it seems to me that the scope of the game is small and narrow. The environments in which to do battle are limited. Far more limited than current FPS players are used too. If you can't match BF3, there's not much left in the space for success.

"The devblog early next week will announce that CCP is changing their resource allocation for 2012 back toward "flying in space" projects"

I'm not sure how that is a prediction of the winter expansion. 2011.

No big deal, I guess. But I've was reading the articles you're linking and just didn't see where you predicted anything about Winter Expansion. So, was curious if I'd missed some nuance.

What you actually said about the Winter Expansion was "It's too late to add new features to that expansion. What CCP is planning to put into it is locked in." Which seems to me to be stating that Winter Expansion was going to be Incarna centric, with some nullsec balancing tossed in ... which is what CCP had been telling us since a little after Incarna released.

EVE Online and the EVE logo are the registered trademarks of CCP hf. All rights are reserved worldwide. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. EVE Online, the EVE logo, EVE and all associated logos and designs are the intellectual property of CCP hf. All artwork, screenshots, characters, vehicles, storylines, world facts or other recognizable features of the intellectual property relating to these trademarks are likewise the intellectual property of CCP hf. CCP hf. has granted permission to Jester's Trek to use EVE Online and all associated logos and designs for promotional and information purposes on its website but does not endorse, and is not in any way affiliated with Jester's Trek. CCP is in no way responsible for the content on or functioning of this website, nor can it be liable for any damage arising from the use of this website.